India is a rapidly growing source of granite and is already one of the leading suppliers of granite and sandstone in the world. The granite quarrying business flourishes around Bengaluru. An estimated 400,000 workers engaged in this work in Karnataka. Shamefully, a large number of them are children. Quarrying is endless, tiring, and perilous work even for a healthy adult. So it’s no surprise to find that the children engaged in breaking granite all day are malnourished and physically drained.
“Living conditions in these places is inhuman. Anagalpura village is only 16 km from MG Road, but there are no roads, no amenities, nothing,” says Jeny Verma, founder of the Lovedale Foundation that runs a school for these children. “Their houses are just one room shacks with no water, no hygiene, and no basic toilet facilities.” Work begins at the crack of dawn and doesn’t stop for a moment until sunset. Alcoholism and drug abuse is rife. So is prostitution, HIV and AIDS. Children born into such a life are forced to add their meagre earnings to keep starvation at bay.
For some of them, though, there is a reprieve. Every morning, a fleet of private vehicles makes its way along the bumpy mud tracks into the quarry. They pick up the children and bring them to the Banyan Tree School, which is run for them. Before the lessons begin, the children are given a morning snack of milk and biscuits.
“For these children, not being hungry is the only concern,” explains Jeny. “There is nothing we can do until they are all well fed and happy.” In the afternoon, the children are given eggs and protein drinks before they head back home at 3 p.m.
The children suffer from many maladies from working and living in a quarry. There is always the danger of being injured by shards of rock, and skin problems from prolonged exposure to the dust and sun, and dehydration are common. “Every child is screened and monitored every month,” says Jeny. “They get a thorough full body check up at these sessions.” An in-house health consultant is on call from morning to evening.
As you might well imagine, settling into the routine of going to school every morning can be difficult. Learning, therefore, is not restricted to textbooks. Life in the classroom is an interactive one, with a number of extra curricular activities to ensure holistic development. “We give a lot of importance to life skills, including martial arts training — self defence is very important, especially for the girls. Just schooling isn’t enough.” The school follows the state syllabus, because it is easy and effective. “These children come from homes where neither parent has an inkling of what a school is, much less a textbook. CBSE and ICSE syllabi might be too much for the kids to deal with and who will help them when they go back home?” Jeny asks.
The Lovedale Foundation works with about 200 children from the rural areas of Bengaluru and about 400 in Tamil Nadu. The process, says Jeny, starts with educating parents. “We counsel parents and explain the benefits of education to them first,” she says. “Parents don’t want to see their children suffer and spreading education is the only way to break the cycle.”
Apart from this, the Lovedale Foundation works to improve the near-inhuman conditions from which these children come. An initiative to build community toilets is underway in the Kanakapura area as also construction of borewells for clean drinking water. What should be theirs by right are actually luxuries for these deprived communities.
“The children are hard to control at first, but they settle down fairly quickly,” says Jeny, referring to the obvious lifestyle shift. “They don’t see themselves as deprived; they only see themselves as children. Only if they go into the city and see children there will they understand.” The University of Technology, Sydney, has recently offered scholarships to the school’s most brilliant pupils. “Our oldest student is now in junior college, so we hope he will make it to Australia when he’s done,” Jeny says.
The kids in the Lovedale Foundation are taken care of all the way to actual employment. Efforts like this that fill the gaping holes left by government apathy and indifference, are the children’s only hope of leading a better life than the one their parents have been condemned to live.